David Emery OnlineKanye On Twitter
This is important.
Historically, there’s been a buffer between star and audience. And this buffer was managed by professionals who’d seen it all and told you how and when to play. It was like everybody with a media profile had a coach. And if you disobeyed him, you were booted from the team.
But now, through the magic of the Web, through the magic of Twitter, a celebrity can speak directly to his audience, can tell his side of the story, sans the reinterpretation and the agenda of the media.
Kanye on Twitter has been really interesting this past few days.
He ‘gets’ it.
Visit ➔iTunes Says Artist Profiles On Ping Invitation Only
We asked Apple to explain and just heard back from a spokesperson that "artist profiles were launched by invitation, but we'll keep adding more and more." No information was provied on who is handing invites or what criteria they are using. But bands do have another option ...kind of. "Any iTunes user can create a profile on Ping, artist or otherwise," reminds Apple.
As a follow up to my earlier post, it does indeed seem to be the case that you have to go through the existing iTunes Connect system that labels/distributors have with Apple.
Interestingly, the recommended artists section on Ping is now suggesting 31 artists, along with the 6 I’m following already, and it’s going up day by day and adding new pages to the box.
Which suggests to me that as of right now, there are only 37 artists active on Ping.
Visit ➔Since October 7, 2005, I’ve Read 219,651 Stories Via RSS. You?
Google is now telling you the total number of items you’ve read all time. For me, that number stands at 219,652 over these past (nearly) 5 years. I would have thought that would be pretty impressive, but apparently some people are much higher, because the Reader team notes that there’s a 300,000 limit on their tallies.
“From your 967 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 51,399 items. Since February 4, 2010 you have read a total of 300,000+ items.”
I feel this feature may be less useful to me than most.
Visit ➔Arcade Fire meets HTML5
What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.
File under “mind blowing” and “why didn’t I think of that”.
It reminds me of when Google first released Google Maps, playing around with the draggable maps and wondering how the hell they did it without using Flash. A little light bulb went off in my (and judging by the buzzword-ification of AJAX, a fair few other peoples) head about the possibilities it revealed were possible.
This is just like that.
Visit ➔Eric Schmidt’s Name Game Doesn’t Make Sense
He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
Assuming this reporting is correct, I think it’s incredible that someone in his position can be so shortsighted; in the future (actually screw that; it’s already happened) people are just going to deal with being Google-able, both from the employer and employee sides. It’s going to be the same for everyone, so it’s not going to be an issue.
Visit ➔Is the web really dead?
Without commenting on the article's argument, I nonetheless found this graph immediately suspect, because it doesn't account for the increase in internet traffic over the same period. The use of proportion of the total as the vertical axis instead of the actual total is a interesting editorial choice.
As you may have read elsewhere, Wired are currently running a ‘The Web Is Dead’ story in a fairly shameless attempt to get traffic (spot the irony). The key basis to their hypothesis is a graph of the split in overall internet traffic between web, video (which apparently includes YouTube, even though that’s a web site…), peer to peer traffic etc. However, as this Boing Boing post so clearly demonstrates, it’s an incredibly misleading graph as it doesn’t account for the fact that internet traffic as a whole has massively increased over the time period they’re graphing.
In other words, Wired are lying with graphics, and it’s pretty shameful and shameless.
Visit ➔Introducing BBC Dimensions
What’s a Dimension then? Well, basically what it says right there on the homepage: “Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.”
More brilliant work from the BERG team.
Visit ➔Arcade Fire's Synchronised Artwork
Morisset has worked with designer Caroline Robert to create a digital artwork that appears when the album is played on mp3 players like the iPod or iPhone. The work deliberately echoes the pleasures of old vinyl record sleeves, where the song lyrics were often written out in full. Each track on the album has an individual image that appears on the iPod screen when it is played, with the lyrics of the song then appearing on the screen as they are sung.
Well this is very clever – you’ve been able to embed time-specific artwork in AAC tracks for ever (and is used a lot in podcasts) but I’ve never seen anyone do anything interesting with it before.
Visit ➔Sleigh-ed In Flame
...But actually this is one of the most forward-looking electro-guitar pop albums of the year (by turns it mixes Atari Teenage Riot with MIA, the Mary Chain and industrial hip-hop beats). It seems to constantly push you to the edge of your senses and then reels you back in. It wants to give you a headache and then sooth your brow.
I love the Sleigh Bells album – got to be not only the best debut of the year so far but one of the best albums of 2010 full stop.
Visit ➔